Hello there. I’m Bruno Rachacuca from Brazil and this is my first blog post on the new Parkour Generations website. I’ve been living and training in London for some months now and I will share with you some of the lessons I’ve been learning with my training peers. Plus, I will be posting in both english and portuguese.

1) Train for health:  Fitness is about being healthy.  Being healthy leads to a longer, more enriching, and a more happy life.  So, if your training is leading to tendonitis, muscle strains, or injuries, you’re defeating the entire point of being active.  But, if you are training for life, you are training for health.  Adopt this long-term view and it will give you the patience and dedication necessary to make positive changes.

My breath was coming out in ragged bursts, my cheeks were burning and I could vaguely see the backs of the people ahead of me. Chippa was leading us on the daily morning run, a ritual that was repeated every morning at 7 sharp, in total silence starting from the Trace Facility. The first day, we ran up the road, back, and over a couple of 4m fences before arriving at a 10m long rail for balancing. On the second day, we ran a little further. On the third day, a lot faster, longer and no breaks. On the fourth, we ran along the railway tracks.

It is quite common for us as practitioners, I think, having broken a new jump or mastered a new movement or overcome a new challenge in training, to then look back and remark: well, that was easy. And it is good, in a sense, to be buoyed by such achievements and successes in our training.

However, there is a you before the jump and there is a you after the jump. And they are very different; though the jump itself remains unchanged.

In October last year I was approached by a magazine and asked if I could make a day trip to Paris to photograph Johnny Sticky Budden. I’ve been photographing Sticky since 2003 and have made some unforgettable trips together. Back in the day, he used to head down to my student house in Birmingham on a Friday night, crash on my floor and then we’d get up at 5am, pick up Blue Devil, and to drive to London to jam with the likes of Kerbie, Asid, Bam, Cable and M2, hitting locations like the Leap of Faith and the Shell Centre.

Since starting Glasgow Parkour Coaching almost 3 years ago the majority of the support and funding towards Parkour in Scotland has come from the Arts community, and very little from the Sports community. Among our biggest supporters are The National Theatre of Scotland and The Scottish Ballet and our youth classes are held in a theatre studio, not a sports Centre.

We’ve all been there – the fear. Standing at the edge, looking out or down, and scared stiff. Thinking about what might happen if we miss, and don’t quite make the jump. We step up, take a look, then step away with a shake of the head. We might not even be particularly high, or on the edge of large gap, but there’s just something about it that plays on our minds, and our bodies. It’s part of the mental and physical challenge of parkour.

Some of you may have heard of the extraordinary opportunity that I’ve been given:  Travel the globe for 12 months on someone else’s dime studying and training parkour.  While this has led to me being labelled all manner of things from “hardworking researcher” to “lucky gringo bastard” in parkour communities around the world, it has also introduced me to the “global parkour community”.

Shortly before leaving for India in January, I asked if anyone was interested in hearing more about a specific photograph from my collection. @jeremesanders kindly got in touch and picked out one of my favourite photographs from a two-part gallery from 2009 entitled ‘Brutalism’.

Balance crucial to Parkour, correct? Yes, it is true, but in some ways balance can be overlooked when training and this can affect both your mindset and your body.

Not one training session goes by without some reference to warrior training or the warrior spirit that is 'essential' to Parkour. Much has been written about competition and how in Parkour the competition is with oneself (or organised by some exploitive company!), we are constantly battling with ourselves to improve, 'break jumps', to 'fight the pain' whilst training physically.

Much has been said and discussed about stretching. I don’t think enough actual stretching has been done.

When we were visited by our Greek friend Panos over Christmas we were accused of not keeping our promises and visiting him for some training in his hometown of Athens. So it came to be that seven of us found ourselves on the Easyjet Athens discount special this March. Panos was an excellent host and his Mother actually seemed to enjoy having six guys and one girl eating them out of house and home while providing some kind of human carpet in their living room every night.